----------------------------------------------------------- NOV-BR98.DOC -- 19980327 -- Various emails on BrainShare'98 ----------------------------------------------------------- Feel free to add or edit this document and then email it back to faq@jelyon.com Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 18:28:35 -0700 From: Joe Doupnik Subject: Re: Client32 install on Win 95 PC >Welcome back Joe...you or other brainshare attendees wouldn't be >planning to post some of the high point for us less traveled pikers? --------- After I catch up on sleep I will submit some brief notes on Brainshare 98/USA. A quicky is Oracle is adding a five user version to NW 5, and if my memory is still working then to also INW 4.11. General reaction to that was very positive. I did not take notes on talks etc; no time for that. Most of my time was spent on the lab floor discussing matters with engineers and managers of particular products. The layout was huge and the number of products corresponded. All in all, an excellent arrangement to cover one's bases without walking miles or playing telephone tag. The Novell folks on the floor did a super job, and that is saying a lot about a highly repetitive situation that went all day for five days. This year's attendence looked to be the usual 5K count, at US$1.5K each for entrance (Novell employees pay the same, ouch). The NSS group demonstrated a 1+ terabyte disk array being shut down willy nilly and restarted. Mount time clocked at 15 seconds in this early code. Nothing lost though the outage. NSS volumes don't use Vrepair either. This is a transaction style file system, unlike regular NW stuff. One can have as many files and as many volumes as one likes, without adding more memory or more mount time. At the moment volume sys: must be regular flavor, but a lot of pressure is being applied to have sys: converted in the NW 5 release box rather than later on. The NRS group has some patches coming out shortly, so keep an eye peeled. It's an underrated nifty product. Clustering technology is marching ahead on a productized basis, as contrasted to the Wolf Mountain tech demonstration. Orion is the code name. More on this later, but it looks attractive and the guys doing the design and writing are really sharp. This product will roll out in phases as the technology is shaken down and embellished. Java is all over, and products are piling onto it rapidly. NW 5 supports full Java natively and reportedly as fast as one can go on the same (Intel) hardware. Border Manager is charging ahead full steam, as it ought. ZEN (Zero Effort Networking) is new and growing like crazy; it is the client manager/push technology/NAL/etc mechanism. Fault tolerance is becoming a major goal. Hence Orion and hot plug board swaps on display. There will be lots more on fault tolerance as time goes on, with the goal being to *never* shutdown the server. Fans can be replaced live, lan adapters added and reconfigured live, disks and controllers too, the whole nine yards. Nothing was said about the software patch situation. Joe D. ------------------------------